Greedy Goblin

Friday, August 28, 2009

The goblin solution for gear

What was the point of the experiment and the 4 pieces series in this week? What it is to do with making money? You'll see today.

Once upon a time there was a game called World of Warcraft. It was an EQ-like an MMO, with level cap of 60. Nobody plays that game anymore, so let's refresh our memories here. In this game, monsters you killed dropped green quality items, sometime blues. Group quests at the ends of long questlines rewarded blues, and you could also get blue items from 5-man dungeons.

These items gave enough stats to enter a beginner raid, where you could find epic quality items. They were quite rare as the boss dropped 1-2 for 40 people. These raids were so hard that only 1-5% of the playerbase could effectively raid. Collecting full epic gear needed extreme dedication and skill. If you saw someone in such gear, you could be 99% sure that he is an extremely good player (1% chance of meeting an e-bay buyer).

This "being epic" and "inspect to see how good the other is" became a custom among the players. Gear became the undoubted signal of skill, it became rather a trophy of an epic battle than used tool.

As I've mentioned, no one plays that game anymore. The company selling it ceased its existence and sold another game under the same name. In this new game epic quality gear rains out of the sky for everyone who spent enough time online, regardless skill. Currently gear shows nothing but play time.

Achievement system is in place for more than a year, showing what did a person do ingame. Anyone can see that I have killed FL+4, despite I did not get any gear from him. Today if someone would want to use a filter to approximate player skill, he should turn to achievements. A player who has Sarth+3 achievement in February is someone skilled without doubt.

However old habits die hard. People still skip Stoneheart Graveyard in Alterac Valley, despite reinforcement points were introduced two years ago. The same way they still check for gear. They prefer the guy with full ilvl 226 over the guy with ilvl 213 and Sarth+3 achievement from February. They are not sure why they do it. The reason is that "epic = great" has burned deep into their brains playing that old forgotten game for years. They don't think that consciously. This became a stereotype, a prejudgement for them.

Some rationalize this behavior as "Top guilds look for people who are dedicated to excellence by socketing and enchanting everything to the max - not because it actually helps dps by a significant amount, but it shows that they care about their character enough to try their hardest.".

The problem is the same: we are not playing Vanilla anymore. "trying hardest" is no longer needed. We don't have to farm world buffs in Felwood. We don't have to run Onyxia zillion times to get scale cloaks. We don't have to farm full T1 for the half raid to have a chance in T2 content.

In Vanilla WoW the progress demanded hard and time-consuming grind. In WotLK it's enough that you are online, have an acceptable gear and be skilled. "Acceptable gear" depends on your aim, for normal modes it means blues, for hard modes it means "the random stuff you collected in 3-4 weeks of running Ulduar normal modes".

Yogg+0 went down not when the world first guild finally transferred enough top players together (4H) or when they farmed enough gear via 24/7 grinding. It went down when a no name guild thought out of the box and used hunters to "tank" the marked Guardians.

WoW is a casual friendly game. It's not bad. Being casual (someone with little play time) is not bad at all. Being a mindless moron or lazy scum blaming his failures on play time is bad.

You don't need gear for itself.You don't need gear as a signal of "trying hardest", because you don't need "trying hardest" itself.You need skill and other skilled players.

There is a simple problem here: nothing tells you how skilled someone is except playing with him. Some very hard achievements can give a hint, but I guess for proper amount of gold I could buy Nightfall+Observed.

So how can you make others to give you a chance to prove yourself. Just saying "I'm good, try me out" is not enough. Every single person out there say the same. OK, you can filter out the hopeless ones from their non-spec gear, missing gems/enchants, "lolololol" and jumping up and down all the time.

But if a guild would use just one Ulduar10 run to try people out, they would be doing 6-7 separate Ulduar10-s, most with utter failure. And while it's easy to find who messed it up terribly, the wiping on XT doesn't tell anything about the skill of those who did not messed up the first gravity bomb. Maybe they were just lucky for not getting it first.

There is a simple motivation method easily available for goblins: gold. If you want to get into a guild, simply offer compensation money in case of failure. Write a proper application answering all their questions and add: "please try me out in an Ulduar 10 run. I pay 5000G for the run, if I fail, consider it a compensation money, if I don't, consider it my first donation for the common guild effort".

If you want to get into a decent-looking PuG, for example one that has a leader who has hard mode achievements and checks everybody's gear and achievements, and you don't have these, offer money for inv. Simply say "I don't have so high gear but I have everything gemmed/enchanted and I pay you 500G to make up for that -300 DPS I make compared to my ilvl226 self."

The obvious goblin question is: why should I pay for a chance to be in a group, assuming I'll be an equal member and not carried M&S? I mean, they should be just as happy to have me as I'm to have them.

Well, you pay for something they have and you don't. They worked very hard for it and you didn't, and upon acceptance you'll enjoy the benefits of this service. No, it's not game skill, you have it also. No, it's not the ability of clearing the aimed content, you have it also. It's the contact list of 20-30 non-M&S player. They worked a lot (for a hard mode raiding guild several hours every week) to create the list in the sea of M&S.

46 comments:

William
said...

Good guilds usually also screen for skill by making potential recruits answer very thorough questions about their gear, spec, stat choices, etc and other theorycrafting. Most M&S don't take the time to fully understand their class, while skilled players always try to keep up to date as best they can.

except that gold is worthless! You can fully kit a toon for uld25 in a decent guild with the money you make from 70-80.

When you make 15-20k a week and spend maybe 1k on raiding, all repairs respec gems consums and noggenfogger, why do you need more gold? It's not like you can get a return on capital, and even then what more could you want?

So what if you can give an elite guild 15k to trial you in a uld25 hard modes, if you fail them their time is totally lost for a worthless currency.

Anyhow, this applies currently to guilds and mostly in 10/25 content, at least as far as I can say. It still doesn't help in the PUG's, especially 5-man which are utter swamp of idiocy, M&S and lacking performance.

Been selling quite a few Algalon 10 kills priced at 30k. I'm sure you could get it even cheaper. Sarth +3 you could probably get for under 5k.

The only achievement lots and lots of money couldn't buy you right now (from us anyway) is Yogg +0 25. Hell, absolutely ridiculous sums could probably get you even that since it should be doable with 24.

"Hard" achievements are costly, but they definitely can be bought if you're willing to throw lots of gold at them.

Ah, but Copra, it does. Even the most M&S social raid leader will realise that if one person sucks and they do half the work of a 'real' person, they can get done with 24.5 people and make 500g.

A decent player will realise that since you're enchanted & gemmed then you probably won't suck. 500g for turning a blind eye to an achievement or two.

A good player (the type Gevlon advocates buying a slot with) realises that it can be done with 18 or even 15 decent players, that there will be people who got carried into the achievement by their guild (lawl, FL+4 and I last night...). You have proper gems and enchants (because a stupid cannot afford the 500g to buy the slot) so you'll be better than an M&S with the achievement.

If they don't accept you into it with that offer it's a run you don't want to do, bound to wipe lots and fail.

@arx, the gold spend is for a trial, not for permenant guild acceptance, so if you sucks, you had to go either

@Smeg, Gold is not worthless, especially to whom specialized in raiding but not good at trading (and more likely spending), Some highend player had a bad time on making money, so the deal is good for them.

A good series of Myth, and I was flamed by many others when I told them this... "Truth hurts."

I am so into Goblin raiding once my new Alt (My new main) reach 80 (Was gathering gold for that)

With the money, I can skip the heroric farming and straight into a progressing raid. Bye M&S PUG ~~~ Thanks for the insights, Gevlon

In FFXI though it was reversed. You need the gear, even if you had the skill to run the instance flawlessly. You needed to understand how to gear, yeah, but you need to have that haste build, you needed to have full macro sets for each spell or it would have problems proccing, you needed to be fully skilled up.

At higher levels you needed to fund relics, which make maxing gold in WoW look kiddie pool in terms of gil spent and time needed. No amount of skill would ever make up for having an Aegis or Gjallerhorn-it enabled linkshells to kill bosses in under a minute through Kraken club zergs (imagine spending 24+ million gold on one item, that's a Kraken Club.)

Even knowing the stuff wouldnt help, you have to have the gear. No amount of theory makes up for the stats. Maybe WoW is different, but they don't make that gear decorative for a reason.

@Above post - Stars had the world first Firefighter right? Really impressive as they got the patch one week later than the rest of the EU/US. They also killed yogg in the same number of instance cycles as Ensida, just a week later.

I don't get the 'news' in this post. The main statement seems to be to pay for being tested in a raid, but you already said that in several posts before.That's to say that I'm a bit disappointed by this conclusion.

I have a question for Gevlon. I buy into the idea of M&S. What I want to know is, what do you do when you're not sure you're M&S or not? Mostly here this applies to WoW (I'm doing fine in the real world). You see, I want to call it an off night, and from my previous experiences, it was. You see, I was benched from just an Ulduar 10 normal modes only run for low DPS. I didn't stand in fires or such, but I wasn't doing even 3k (I was at only 2.8k)DPS as a mage. The problem is, I normally do more than that in heroics. Heck, I carry most heroics on my DPS alone (or, theoretically, I could, though I guess if the math was done for it, you could say the others were pulling their weight). What's worse is, I did better in Ulduar 25 on a laggy piece of crap computer. You know, doing 4k+ in Ulduar 25 is ok, especially when your computer isn't cooperating. But then to turn around and do sub 3k in what is essentially an easier instance is not exactly helping my confidence (or my guilds confidence in me. I would do goblin raiding, but since I stand on a measly 2000 gold, I don't see that happening till I take inscription).

Hmmm... in asking, I think I have my answer. Man up, accept that I was benched (thank god for that, shows my guild leader has a spine), and move on. Review fights, just to double check. do better next time. I guess that's all I can do. Oh, and keep making money.

I was living up to this post for a big climax, but it's actually a summary of what you've been telling for a while. Nice post nonetheless. I do wonder though if the epic checking is still a remainder from vanilla. I actually think the vanilla players are in minority these days, this is just simple thinking of morons that don't know any better, and goes like: "I can't do shit without epic gear, so no one else can, ergo we need exceptionally well geared players to punch a dent in a pack of butter".

BTW, I hope you're not secretly defending your paying for a guild spot with this again. Those people that make a problem out of that should stop whining. I think it's a far more decent and respectful way to get into a good guild then manipulating your way in via friends or similar methods.

I don’t agree with the point that in vanilla wow, a player with 100% epic gear was a skilled player. I played since the beginning doing mc, bwl, aq40, naxx. We were about 15-20 really good players. The other 20 sucked but we pulled them through the instances and they also get their gear. It was the same like it is today, except that today a guild with 25 sucking nonskilled players can do every raid in normal mode.

Actually it's a new idea. I previously stated that I pay every week to make up for my low attendance.

In this post I suggest to buy your way ONCE to have a CHANCE to prove yourself. Upon proving you would be a normal member without paying.

The reason is why paying is necessary since there are too many wannabe members. So you have to pay for the time of those who check you out. It's equal to the money you pay the office who give you the driving license. Actually you don't pay for the license (that's bribing), you pay for being checked. You'll get the license for your driving skills, or not. However if you don't pay, you won't be checked at all.

From personal experience with vanilla wow raiders I would actually say that general quality of them is low and definitely not as skilled as you would expect.I have to admit I have also met quite a few really skilled ones, but most of them also were in AQ40/Naxx40 guilds back then. Something which most people weren't in vanilla days.

Besides skill and gear I would throw in another term for judging players for raiding: Mentality. Why? because focus and proper preparing is half downing a boss. Every week there are people in my current guild that either whine about not having gold for repairs or find their repairs too high, or whining about which instance we go (be it Ulduar, ToC, hardmodes w/e).

So yeah, I would at mentality in the mix, because one can have all the skill and gear in the world, but with a mentality of shit they will be worthless nonetheless.

I don't think you're right about anyone in original WoW with 40-man raids who has full epics having a high chance of having skill.

I was in a guild back then that wasn't the best on the server, but we did fairly well and cleared through most of AQ40 and a bit of Naxx before Burning Crusade hit, and 40-man raids were just an excuse for lazy people to pretend they were trying when they weren't. When there are 39 other people to pick up slack, I'd say only 25-30 people in a given raid would actually try their best, and 40 people is a lot to fill, so sometimes it wasn't easy to say "You're being sat out today because you don't try".

When you're using a DKP system, they earn DKP just as much as the people who try harder, so they get the gear, even though they may be M&S.

If you have lots of gold to toss around why not just buy the epics from the AH, theres only a couple slots you will miss without gold.

I found myself raiding a lot less lately but gold seems to keep me in the item level loop.

also pugging TOC is now very good with the new patch letting you trade with anyone in the raid. Most ppl in a whisper will sell you the drops that you failed to roll on and since TOC can be pugged, if you have the gold do you really need a guild?

@Anonymous:We would let every friend of a member into the guild, as a friend spot. If they want a raiding spot they would have to surivive the trial period like everyone else where we don't care if it's a friend of someone or not. It is also needed of the friendspot to make an application before getting promoted to trial.

Only guilds that already have a fair share of M&S in the leadership will allow friends in blindly on peoples recommendation and the worst thing you can do with a guild that is trying to be successfull in terms of progress, is to recruit someone because they are a "nice guy"-

@Josh: That is a possibility, after all MC and BWL and up to Twins in AQ40 was shiteasy and could've been 20 manned if it wasnt for the enrage timers that started to come in AQ40.

However, if you check kills of specific bosses (Twins, C'thun, Ouro, Gothik, Thaddius, 4 horsemen, Loatheb, Sapphiron, Kelthuzad) those really didn't let you have 20 slackers, not even 5. I still remember he horrible night of wiping at thaddius when people where slower than others on getting how to jump or how to move with the charges. 1 player dead ment that the dps wouldn't be sufficient for the enrage timer.

About AV. On our server, we are often running AV Premades. The best honor/time ratio strat we have is this :

Group 1-2-3-4 goes cap stormpike, aid station, and both bunkers. then they go VannGroup 5-6 goes to icewing and stoneheart. Once capped, icewing group goes to Vann and stoneheart group goes help on D (recap iceblood and towerpoint towers)Group 7-8 are balinda then D recapping iceblood and towerpoint.As soon as all ally towers are capped, we quickly down Vann.

I Someone ever cap Stoneheart Graveyard, then it screws this strat. When allies dies, we want them to respawn at stoneheart. Not in ally base or at stonespike.

With this strat, we have a win ratio of about 95% with games running about 9 minutes for 1500 honor.

I was convinced by other players that gear meant something... then I ran with a skilled player and saw that someone in green can out heal someone all purpled out that does not know how to play... that was a rude awakening and made me change the way I looked at the game. I have seen this theme over and over and it has really reshaped the way I look at progression and the game.

I play casually and with a group of friends where skill is all over the place. We have no issues with that because we play for fun and friendship and not for purples or achievements (even though we still slowly get them).

WoW is NOT a hard game... WoW has basic principles than when followed will reward you...

I also thank God that I am in a low population server, because I think the higher the population the higher the pressure to do x or y... we can just chill and be casual, playing our own game. Its truly sad that people that want to advance in progression are constantly being shadowed by purples rather than skill.

Yeah, that I have a spec that's somewhat standard (according to theorycrafting and such), that I gem and enchant following suggestions of theorycrafting sites, and in general, that I use a rotation that comes highly recommended, all suggests that it was something else up. Of course, I wasn't allowed to get past Ignis/ Razorscale that run, so maybe my DPS didn't shine through as well (we were going to attempt XT heartbreaker, where single target DPS is pretty important, and where I think I would have finally shown that I don't suck). Also, for some reason, my raid leader was under the impression that I'd never done Uld 10 before, even though I had done about the first half of it. Not because I was sitting in fires or anything, just because I was new to their guild. Oh well, I can only try better next time.

Meh. I've been thoroughly unimpressed with this series of posts. I'm not completely sure why. I think it is the preachy, bombastic style that comes across with a sizable dose of arrogance and maybe even bigotry.

Gevlon's intolerance for M&S is legendary, but in this case the argument has almost become "if you can't do Ulduar10 in blues, then you're slacking." Just look a Culden. The poor guy isn't even sure if he is M&S or not.

I'm almost done coming here to find yet another post full of musings and philosophies about M&S, how bad they are, and why it is so important not to be such, etc.

As Gevlon says in this very post, WoW is not a game designed for hardcore players. So you shouldn't be surprised to actually find casual players wandering around. With each new patch it becomes more and more obvious that target audience for this game is not necessarily the gamer who strives for excellence.

Many/most of the casual players are terribad at games. They often they don't know or care that they aren't as good as other players and they certainly don't aspire to be better. They don't know about DPS (or what it stands for), they have never heard of addons, and they don't understand simple gameplay mechanics like +hit and mp5, or buffs procs like replenishment. They are completely oblivious to the presence or absence of these things. For these guys, any strategy more sophisticated than a simple kill order is too much effort to worry about. Further, they have an extremely high tolerance for failure.

I deliberately spent about 4 months with a toon in a family+friends (not mine) guild. The guild leader had a 0/0/71 mage and a 3/66/2 priest. I tried recommending changes but my suggestions were never implemented. For a couple of months I wiped my way through the WotLK non-heroic instances with them. (Occasional we threw in an attempt at a heroic when they were feeling particularly reckless).

This entire time, these guys thoroughly ENJOYED themselves. They loved doing half of the holiday quests (finding Easter eggs etc), grinding rep, and always showed off their most recent non-combat pets whenever I saw them. They were really cool and helpful people too. They weren't a bunch of idiots either -- they just didn't care about performance very much.

The bottom line is that this game is swarming with these casual (terribad) players. There is no way getting around this and I'm tired of reading derisive (though completely valid) complaints about them.

In all honesty though, if M&S and casuals bother you so very much Gevlon, you really should consider going to play EVE. EVE is likely a very, very good fit for you in so many ways. I'm uncertain whether you will care about these things I have written and your reaction to my post isn't particularly important to me. I just felt like putting sharing my opinion.

First off, you won't ever know if someone is playing an "alt" - they may have the achievement on another toon.

Secondly, a person might have the skill, but not had the opportunity to get the achievement. Perhaps they were benched the night the guild got Sarth+3 - or even more seriously, perhaps they are in a guild that doesn't raid on a regular basis, or has been dabbling in raids for a while, but not really starting to do the hardmodes?

I also disagree that gear is a check for skill. Now, rather than "back in the day" it requires skill both on the part of the interviewee as the interviewer to evaluate the gear.

Back when I was rolling around in heroic blues, I was able to pick up a purp set of shoulders. But, they were tanking shoulders. Certainly not great by any long-shot for a DPS paladin, but better than what I was wearing, by a fair bit, when I gemmed and chanted them out. I kept the blue shoulders in the bags just for the sake of people who do gearchecks.

My first naxx run, I had a gear check (it was a partial pug). And the first question they asked me was why I had a pair of tanking shoulders. I asked them to invite the pally lead to the conversation, and they gracefully accepted. After showing the old gear and the new gear, they not only accepted me into the run, but kept inviting me back. They realized that, even though they were tanking shoulders, I was a skilled enough player to recognize that I could make what would have been a bad piece for me, into a good piece by properly gemming and chanting it. (BTW, I rolled in them tank shoulders for a good long while - at least a month, before the sweet mistress of RNG decided to drop something for me)

The point I am making here is that gear is still the best way to judge wether a person is skilled enough. It just takes the person reviewing the gear to be equally skilled in evaluating the gear too. Its easy to pass over someone in blues now-days, or that has a less than perfect gearset. Its difficult to find the ones that actually know what they are doing with what they have.

People who ask me to link my achievement for something, I stout-heartedly refuse. I do, however, offer them a few parses of my raids showing that I can pull 3-4k dps in a 10 man fight.

Honestly, I slightly agree with some of your points, but you lost my support when you called STARS a no-named guild. Any raider worth their salt knew about them well back into burning crusader when they were steamrolling content(after US/EU admittedly) but exceptionally fast and in terrible gear as a result of their speed. I guess to an extent, they PROVE the point you've been trying to make over a year ago.

Your idea of "epics=good" in classic wow is flawed. People could bot their way to rank 14 and be terrible, people were carried through high end raids despite being bad. Even in Naxx40 you could have 10-15 slackers be carried through. I do agree that achievements are the best indication of skill atm however.

One thing you should not over look now is the ability to purchase things that other people won.

With loot able to be traded after the fact. You just have to pick a number they cannot turn down. I almost picked up a staff like that this week.

I was still sporting a naxx staff on my reroll priest and a upgrade droped in ToC 10. I started to offer to buy it but when he mentioned it was a big upgrade for him too I backed off. I didn't say how much at the time.

We were talking about it later and I mentioned I thought about droping 6k-7k gold on it he was a bit shocked.

It is not only the progression they had in WotLK, but they were impressive throughout TBC as well. They cleared all content with sub-par gear (BT included) while being months behind due to the expansion arriving way too late in mainland China.

I think I can even remember them competing in Sunwell, while being behind gear wise. Their guild structure has always interested me (nothing like EU/US) and it might be worth writing articles about such a phenomenon.

Honestly, I slightly agree with some of your points, but you lost my support when you called STARS a no-named guild. Any raider worth their salt knew about them well back into burning crusader when they were steamrolling content(after US/EU admittedly) but exceptionally fast and in terrible gear as a result of their speed. I guess to an extent, they PROVE the point you've been trying to make over a year ago.

_____________________

You aren't really making his credibility depend of his knowledge from raidguilds?I've cleared Ulduar (every hardmode except yogg+0 and +1, we somewhat failed at +1), I cleared Sunwell pre nerf and I seriously can't tell you much about raidguilds/groups. I know ensidia, SK-Gaming (do they actually still play?), exodus and yep I've heard from Stars.

But honestly I didn't remember that they were those guys that cleared bc up to Illidan really fast (what was it? 8 weeks or something?) until someone told me.

SK and Nihilim merged and forged ensidia(with only the best members). If you paid any amount of attention in sunwell, i believe STARS ranked very high on killing Kil'Jaeden(3rd-6th world.... somewhere in there)

My main point is, their accomplishments are out there, they aren't a no-named guild, they just are hyped like Ensidia. Hell, if STARS is no-named guild, i guess to most people Premo is a no-named guild.

Back to why i posted in the first place.-Although he DOES have some good points, and i agree with them for the most part, i can't really accept how he declares yogg 0 beaten by some no-name guild that just tried something *different*. It just isn't true, they are hardcore raiders that have been on the cutting edge of ALL content available to them, and (call it due to strats/vids being on or whatever) have beaten all content much faster than Ensidia or anyone else for that matter.

You just can't get off calling them no-named if you aren't going to even pay attention to top end raiding guilds.

That's also a market to be explored by guilds. Before WotLK hit and Amani War Bears where being removed from the game, the top guild in my server started carrying 2 people through the timed runs for 10k.

Also, I payed 5k to have a chance at MTing Sunwell. Finding 24 other people who are up to the possibly hardest raid made so far is worth that amount of gold. Unfortunately, while being a tank makes puging and finding small guilds a breeze, working your way to the top ones is rarely a possibility. Guilds are usually built around a tank, so in most cases the GM is a tank or the guild has tanks that have be so since Vanilla.

I think you are missing Gevlons point. There is nothing wrong with being a casual player that doesn't care about personal performance etc if you play with them. However if you try to be good you better make sure that you are doing it the right way and not only ask for [Epic] when people are joining your groups.

@Yogg+0 debate, I think that Gevlon might've thought of the first yogg10+0 which was killed by Paragon on Lightning's Blade EU first. Sure they are a pretty good guild but has never been up this high as in Ulduar.